Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey guys, check it out.
I got Eric Margulies on the phone.
He's up there in Toronto, and of course he's covered, what, 15 wars, something like that.
Knows everything about everything and was there at the time when it happened.
I don't know anything about sports.
Oh, he doesn't know about sports.
He knows about everything else.
He used to drink with Hemingway when he was a kid.
That guy's been everywhere.
Listen, so, and he wrote War at the Top of the World, and he wrote American Raj, Liberation or Domination, both of which are absolutely essential to your understanding of every single thing.
And he writes at ericmargulies.com.
That's his website.
Spell it like Margolis.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Eric?
I'm alive and kicking, Scott.
Great.
I'm very happy to hear that.
And writing.
You write great stuff.
Thank you.
And top of the season to you, too.
Oh, yeah, man.
Happy holidays and so forth.
Thank you.
Hey, so listen, one of the many things that you know many things about is the nation state of France.
I remember for one anecdote of an example, in the summer of 2011, you said to me, you said, I just got back from France, where all my diplomatic and military and intelligence friends were telling me that they're intervening in Syria, helping the terrorists target the government there.
So you know lots of stuff about France.
And right now there's all kinds of stuff going on there.
So why don't you tell us everything you know about that?
Well, France is still boiling.
The problem is the new president, Macron, doesn't command deep respect in France.
He's regarded as sort of a young kid without much substance who somehow found himself as president.
He has no real political party to back him up.
There's great or there always is great discontent in France.
French are notorious grumblers.
But what happened was that Macron made the foolish mistake of raising taxes by imposing new taxes on fuel, particularly diesel, which the French use and love.
And this was the straw that broke the French camel's back.
There was just a general uprising across France.
All these people who carry these little yellow security vests in their cars in case the car breaks down, which is a very good idea, put them on and went into the streets.
There was horrible rioting in Paris, not from the yellow vests, as they were known, but from professional anarchists in their midst who join every riot and start vandalizing and breaking things.
It shocked the hell out of France.
Macron finally backed down and rescinded the tax hikes, but he's left looking weak and his discontent is still boiling.
Man.
All right.
So now throw in sort of right, left, what have you sort of politics here.
Are they more either of those things?
Well, interestingly, Macron is called he wants to be above right, left politics.
I mean, he's really like a Hillary Clinton neoliberal type, right?
No, he's not entirely because he used to be a banker for the Rothschilds.
Well, yeah, that's what I mean.
Yeah, well, in the sense that Hillary represents big business and the banks.
Yeah, there is a similarity for sure.
But he said he didn't want right or left anymore.
He wanted an independent policy.
But what's happened now is he's gotten the right and the left furious at him, and they were rioting with equal gusto.
Oh, I see.
And then but you say were I mean, is the whole thing in a lull now?
Or are they got most of what they wanted enough?
Well, the French riot by schedule.
They're very punctual and they generally riot only on weekends in this case.
And so we'll see what happens this coming weekend.
Last weekend, the number of demonstrators were only half of the weekend before.
So the demonstrators seem to be losing some of this steam.
The French police in order to crack down harder.
And there was the threat that troops might be called into the streets.
It didn't happen yet, or at least only in a small amount.
So right now, things are dying down.
But something, an incident of some kind, somebody getting run over or hit by a stun grenade or something, could fire the whole thing up again.
Man, well, that's interesting.
I saw someone was joking around about how Americans were shocked that this would happen, since we all know that the French are all just a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys, as Jonah Goldberg plagiarized from The Simpsons, and that they have no history of cutting their leaders heads off there or anything crazy like that.
What do they know about standing up for themselves, the French?
This is all very surprising to us.
There's great antipathy towards the French, particularly on the right wing of the United States.
Know-nothing conservatives who have no sense of history love to attack the French.
They hate the French because the French make fun of them, and because the French are better educated, better mannered, their food is better, and they are more intellectual than some of these yahoos that mock them.
Of course, they forget that without French help, the American Revolution would never have occurred, and thanks to Rochambeau and Lafayette, we are not under British control now, thank God.
Yeah, well, no, they have forgotten that if they ever knew that, but they do know that we fought two world wars to save them from the Germans, and that's all they need to know.
That's right, that's right.
Even though the first time we saved them from the Germans created the second time we really needed to save them from the Germans was before they were all right.
World War I would have ended by negotiations if Woodrow Wilson had not intervened in 1917 and sent a million American troops and overturned the apple cart and guaranteed that World War II would occur.
So we have a very unsavory role in the whole thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a great book by Jim Powell for people who are not familiar with that argument.
It's called Wilson's War, How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder Created Hitler, Stalin, and World War II.
And I guess he left out Israel and the British Empire in the Middle East and all these other problems we've had too since then.
Anyways, speaking of Israel and the Middle East and the consequences of World War I and stuff like that, how about this great article that I guess stands alone in all media?
I didn't even read about this at Mondoweiss, and I read them every morning.
A Big Step for Greater Israel.
The Trump administration quietly changed America's long-held position on Syria's strategic Golan Heights.
What's a Golan Heights, Eric Margulies?
The Golan Heights are a volcanic plateau that rises up, I don't know how many feet it's high, on the eastern border of Israel, between Israel and Syria.
It's been Syrian since time immemorial.
But it's very strategic because when you sit on top of the heights, as I have, I walk the whole heights, you can look down all over the plain of Galilee right to the Mediterranean.
And if you turn around and look the other way, you can see Damascus.
And so it is also the source of about a quarter of Israel's groundwater that flows down from Mount Hermon on the Israeli, on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
It's high enough to have substantial snow in the winter.
So it's very strategic, and it dominates all of southern Lebanon.
And the Israelis and Syrians have fought over it a number of times, very violently.
It's a very strategic place.
And right now Israeli listening posts on top of Golan can listen in to people's telephone calls in Damascus.
And now the Israelis seized it in 1967 when they took the West Bank and Gaza, too, right?
They did.
And though ordered by the UN to return it, they never have.
What happened to the human beings who owned the property there?
They were ousted.
They were evicted by the ethnic clans, by the Israelis.
Somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000, as I recall, residents were driven out by the Israelis.
The capital of Golan, Quneitra, was leveled by Israeli bulldozers.
The Israelis have moved in large numbers of settlers and military positions.
And they have virtually annexed it, so they will never give it up, even though the UN has called for them to return it.
And just now the Trump administration quietly announced that the U.S. would drop its objection to Israeli occupation of Golan and accept it as another chunk of greater Israel.
Well, and I guess that one's easier because, as you said, they finished the ethnic cleansing campaign then.
They did their kind of mini Nakba at the time.
So unlike with Gaza and the West Bank, it's already a bunch of Israeli citizens that live there anyway.
So it's easier to get away with doing that without causing as much of a controversy, because they don't have really anybody to complain except the evil, satanic government of Syria.
And wherever these refugees are, I guess they don't have cameras and microphones in their refugee camps where they live.
No, they don't.
What's ironic, of course, is that the United States is blasting Russia for having annexed Crimea.
Crimea belonged to Russia for hundreds of years.
And yet it's blasting, accepting the Israeli occupation of Golan without a peep of protest.
Yeah, wow.
And so now what difference does it really make?
Because as you say, it's been like this for 50 years now.
Well, the difference is that Syria refuses to contemplate any kind of peace agreement with Israel until Golan is returned.
This issue has been discussed a number of times, but it festers on.
And it could spark another war.
Certainly if there's fighting between the two countries, the first place it'll happen will be on Golan.
But now the Israelis, I mean, hell or high water or whichever negotiations, they're never going to give this up because of the strategic heights, as you're saying.
Never, ever.
The water is the most important issue of all.
They claim it's for safety and against terrorism, but it's really about water and strategic real estate.
You know, it's so funny, the double standards here.
I was reading up about Iraq War One and about Saddam's different offers to negotiate his way out of Kuwait before the war started.
And a couple of different times he said, yeah, so we'll negotiate the end of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.
And he was actually being extremely reasonable about it, too reasonable almost, and saying, but you promised to hold a conference and resolve the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
So he wasn't saying, as soon as the Israelis get out of Palestine, then I'll get out of Kuwait.
He wasn't being that hard about it, but he was saying, look, I'll get out of Kuwait, but you guys have to agree that you're going to do something about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
And in fact, I think it was in the New York Daily News articles about it, where they wrote it in such frank language, making the direct comparison, whereas almost always there's such a double standard and such a separate narrative that those things would never be compared with each other at all or anything like that.
And in fact, even in the article, they said the Israelis insist that the occupation, and they called it that, they didn't say disputed territories, that the future of the occupied territories cannot be negotiated or dictated from the outside as an internal affair only.
So meanwhile, but the context of Iraq and Kuwait is the UN and the New World Order and the rule of law and the international coalition and all, it's everybody's business what's going on on the Iraq-Kuwait border.
But in the occupation of Israel, the Israelis insist that it's no one else's business.
And that's basically good enough for us.
That's right, Scott.
It's astounding hypocrisy.
Tragic sidebar to this, too.
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, when he heard Saddam say this, believed it foolishly and came out in support of Saddam Hussein.
So the Kuwaitis now, who helped engineer this crisis, turned violently.
They had the second largest Palestinian diaspora group lived in Kuwait, I think it was 400,000 Palestinians, and in retaliation expelled them from Kuwait.
This was the second biggest expulsion of Palestinians since the Israelis ethnically cleansed them in 1948.
Man, that's terrible.
That footnote's going to have to go in my next book, too.
I'm working on the Iraq War I section right now.
Oh, congratulations to you.
Your pen moved swiftly.
Yeah, well, I won't bore you with the whole story, but I got away with getting the rough draft basically done for me.
It's a transcript, but it's going to work, I think, to turn the whole thing into a book.
It was a very long-winded speech.
But anyway, yeah, man, so yeah, I'm working on that.
And in fact, fun little side note was I saw a clip of Noam Chomsky saying that, you know what, the only good newspaper on Saddam's different piece offers was New York Newsday, and nobody else covered it because they're all evil and work for the man.
And so I couldn't find those.
So I emailed Noam Chomsky.
I was like, hey, can you help me out with a footnote?
He's like, oh, yeah, Chapter Six of Deterring Democracy, and also check out my interviews here, here, and here.
And he didn't give me the dates of the Newsday articles, but he gave me where I could find them for sure.
Newsday has a very good reputation.
Yeah, he's great.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and Chomsky's great, too.
Here he is 90-something years old, and he remembers all his footnotes from 1990.
I was there in Kuwait, in Baghdad during that period, so I remembered vividly, too.
Hang on just one sec for me.
Guys, you got to check out Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military-industrial complex in America after World War II, during the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, and it's a real education.
Check it out, The War State, by Mike Swanson.
And also check out his great investment advice at WallStreetWindow.com.
All right, so, you know, I think maybe I should take this occasion to ask you to tell me everything that you know and think about Iraq War I.
Well, I have to— Is that overly broad?
No, I'll try and condense it as much as possible.
There were— No, no, no, I want the long version.
Go ahead.
Okay, here goes.
There were growing tensions between Iraq and Kuwait, because Iraq saw itself as the champion of Arab nationalism, and it saw Kuwait as a vestige of British and then American colonialism in the Mideast.
Kuwait had been part of Iraq historically, and the British detached it, as they did Dubai and Abu Dhabi and those places, as little separate protectorates through which they control oil.
So these were artificial creations with very little historic or nationalist authenticity.
Anyway, Saddam now started squabbling with Kuwait about the border, the desert border between them, and about oil, because the Kuwaitis began slant drilling and putting pipes in, which was a new novelty then.
It's not today, but then they were doing lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and stealing Iraqi oil.
It infuriated the Iraqis.
So there was tremendous squabbling.
And to top it all off, the Kuwaitis had loaned Iraq billions of dollars to fight their war against Iran in the 1970s.
Am I dates right?
I think so, yes.
And all of a sudden the Kuwaitis said, we'll give us our money back.
And Iraq was still shattered by the war.
It had lost half a million soldiers.
It was pretty well bankrupt.
And now the Kuwaitis were banging on the door for money.
So there was terribly bad blood.
And the Americans and the British, of course, were supporting the Kuwaitis.
And things finally came to a head at an Arab Brotherhood peace conference that was held.
I don't remember where it was.
I think it was maybe in Saudi Arabia, where the Kuwaiti crown prince, who was considered by many to be mentally defective, certainly very unpopular, sort of a modern version then of today's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
He gave a speech denouncing the Iraqis, and he pounded his fist and he said, we'll pay the Iraqis.
Let the Iraqis pay us.
Instead of money, let them send their war widows to our harems.
This is a huge Arab insult, just huge.
You can't imagine how big it was.
When the Iraqis heard about this, Saddam blew his top and banged his pistol down on the desk and said, invade the bastards, and ordered the Iraqi army to invade Kuwait.
And that, to my best of my knowledge, is how that war began.
It was not a nefarious plot by Saddam to conquer the whole region or roll on into Saudi Arabia.
It was just a real Bedouin Arab tribal raid to avenge a dire insult.
That's so interesting.
All I've read about the beginning of this has never mentioned that.
And although I have a couple books on my shelf that I have been meaning to get into, but I've never heard of that before in my life, and I could see how that would play into it.
So this was, okay, so I mean, in the timeline here, you have the infamous meeting where April Glaspie on July 25th told Saddam Hussein, 1990, told Saddam Hussein, oh yeah, I don't know, James Baker told me to tell you, I don't care what you do here, pal.
And then you had a couple other State Department flunkies, and even Bush Sr. sent a letter to Saddam that was pretty conciliatory and seemingly was like giving him a flashing yellow light to go ahead and invade.
So then it's a week later, right?
Seven days later on August 2nd is when he launches the invasion.
So was this insult in between the 25th and the 2nd?
Yes.
As far as I'm doing by memory, it was in between.
So he was already rolling tanks near the border and was threatening them and was trying to, he was playing hardball, trying to negotiate, and then they added this insult to injury and that was the last straw, huh?
That lit the fuse.
Amazing.
And there is a belief, certainly in the Arab world, that the Bush administration lured Saddam into attacking Kuwait.
The whole thing was planned.
They wanted to clip Saddam's wings because the Saudis were getting scared of him.
And this is what they did it this way through the April Gillespie comments about we have no position on Arab border disputes.
And it was either tremendously Machiavellian or just a big fat blunder.
Yeah, you know, I mean, and I really want to know that too.
I've been, you know, researching that question as best as I can and reading the people who are making those accusations.
And in fact, you know, Mullah Omar told Arnaud de Bourghrave in the summer of 2001.
A dear friend of mine, by the way.
Oh, really?
Oh, I didn't know that.
I can imagine.
Yeah, you guys were buddies covering the 80s jihad against the Soviets back then.
So Arnaud, and I interviewed him one time, by the way, about, oh, I know what it was.
It was about Israeli bases in Azerbaijan, that they're threatening Iran.
He was an interesting guy.
Anyways, so Mullah Omar told Arnaud de Bourghrave that bin Laden believed that Iraq War One was a setup from beginning to end, that that was part of his whole narrative, that it was just an excuse, I guess, from his point of view, to get that foothold or to expand that footprint in Saudi Arabia there.
And, you know, to dominate the region.
That's right.
And Saudi is Saddam.
Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom.
Learn from the greats.
Click through from the link in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org.
So I'll get a kickback.
That's Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, libertyclassroom.com.
All right.
So now I talked with Barry Lando, and I have his book, but I haven't read it yet.
But I've read a bunch of his great articles.
And I basically talk with him every January when it's the anniversary of Iraq War One.
But I just talked to him a few days ago, you know, with the Bush senior dying as the event to go over there.
And we talked about this a bit.
And he said that, and I've been reading more and more about this, that Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of CENTCOM, and the CIA as well, according to Lando, were telling the Kuwaitis to take a hard line while the State Department was making, and even the president himself were taking a soft line and leading Saddam to believe that they would not react harshly if he did this.
And then, so you could say, like, I mean, it's pretty obvious.
It's not a conspiracy theory to say that these guys all sit on the same National Security Council together, and that ain't even really 3D chess, right?
That's just chess to get something like that going.
So it's not in the realm of crazy or what have you.
But then there seems to be, like, a lot of anecdotal stuff about how, yeah, no, really, James Baker thought it would be perfectly fine if Saddam occupied the northern oil fields.
The Kuwaitis were cheating, as you were saying, overproducing from these shared wells and with the horizontal drilling and all this.
And so go ahead and break their knees.
That's West Texas rules.
Whatever, man.
No problem.
And then Bush himself had said, well, you know, we're not going to intervene here and this kind of thing, and hemmed and hawed for a few days until Margaret Thatcher called him the P word on TV.
I don't know if it was on TV or if it was just in the papers the next day.
But, you know, it seemed like it wasn't until Thatcher really called him out.
But that could have been part of the plan, too.
I don't know.
I don't want to put that completely past him.
But it seems like a very obvious prima facie case, as I say that, for, yeah, they set him up.
They set the Kuwaitis up, too, for that matter, in this thing.
But then at the same time, it's just as easy to figure that, well, you're talking about George Bush, Sr., who was only, like, one click smarter than George Bush, Jr., and it could be just that they really blew it.
But then, so you're telling me you were there.
So, I mean, what did you think at the time?
Did you think that they had set him up at the time?
Yes.
Because, I mean, they were selling weapons even all through that spring.
Yeah, I was very believed that the crisis had been contrived or fanned by the U.S., which thought that Saddam had gotten too big for his britches, and he was suddenly a nonresponsive dictator.
He was RSOB, but he wasn't taking orders anymore.
Saddam had become reckless in defying in the United States.
He thought he was really much more powerful than he was.
He thought he had all the Arab states behind him.
So it was a series of blunders on all sides, as is usually the case in most wars.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's funny, because reading about his offers to negotiate, he kept dropping things.
I mean, at first he said he wanted to stay in part of the Rumelia oil field, and he wanted to keep this island in the Persian Gulf.
And then, nah, forget all that.
Just promise that someday you'll negotiate Palestine.
And they were like, no, no deal.
No conditions.
You know.
That's right.
That's right.
And I certainly have the view that they thwarted, that Washington thwarted Saddam's efforts to pull out from Kuwait because they wanted to see the Iraqis destroyed, or at least whittled down to size, and to see their army destroyed.
And that would have both gotten Saddam out of the way, and it would have implanted U.S. power in Saudi Arabia in a much bigger way.
And it worked.
So it was a Machiavellian plan.
Whether it was Jim Baker's plan—he was a very smart man—or whose plan it was, I don't know.
But it worked out, and Saddam fell right into the trap.
Yeah.
You know, one anecdote—and I have no idea how much value to put on this, but I like it— was Richard Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism, and his book says that James Baker told him that Bush Sr. is an idiot, and that if it was me, I wouldn't have done that war.
Of course, he was the Secretary of State who lied us into it at the time.
So not to let him off the hook or anything, but I like the idea, first of all, of just that he had nothing but disrespect for Bush Sr., who everybody else wants to put on this pedestal, which is understandable when you compare him to his son, the worst person in the world, but— Oh, Trump.
Oh, well, yeah, I'm still Bush Jr.'s worse than Trump so far.
Okay.
Trump could be much worse, but if you just go by the pile of skulls so far, even at the rate he's going, Bush was way ahead by this point.
Well, I agree.
The long-lasting damage from the Iraq invasion is the worst disaster the U.S. has had in foreign policy.
It will last for decades.
Yeah.
And maybe forever, right?
I mean, this is the thing—in fact, now that we're talking about that, let's talk about that.
It seems to me like, as I'm saying every day on this show, I'm sure my audience has a high turnover rate because they're sick of hearing me say the same thing here, but that this central policy in American policy in the Middle East is that they're really mad that they overthrew Saddam for the Ayatollah and that they benefited Iran so much, and especially that they stayed— not that they would ever admit it this way to themselves or out loud to us, but they're mad that they stayed.
Not only did they get rid of Saddam, but they fought a five-year civil war for the Shiite side, which included this massive sectarian cleansing campaign to kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and create this new Iraqi Shiite stand that's much closer to Iran than to the U.S.
And so that drives them crazy.
That's responsible.
That craziness is why they went on to back the jihadists in Syria, to try to bring Iran down a peg there, as Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg, et cetera.
And that's—so that's the whole thing, is that even though it was the bin Ladenites who attacked us, it's Iran that our government hates so much because they're independent from us and they keep benefiting from all of our anti-Iranian activities in the region in every way.
But then, so, that's one thing, and I guess I'm interested in what you think about that, that they're, like as Seymour Hersh called it, the redirection, where ever since 06, basically they're trying to make up for 03 through 06.
But then—so part of that, too, though, is that, for example, the Arabian kings will not stand for the fact that this sectarian cleansing campaign worked and that Baghdad is now a super-duper, like 85 or 90-something percent Shiite city, and that the Shiites have total control over the national government there, and they can't do anything about it.
It took the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to make it that way.
It took them five years.
And so no one can reverse it.
But they also absolutely can't stand it.
So that's where you get all these quotes from like Bandar saying that we can't stand the Shiites, we're going to crush them, and that's why we're doing our jihad in Syria and all this.
So back to what you're saying about could last decades, could last forever, right?
They're never going to be able to accept the fact or do anything about the fact that Baghdad is now a Shiite city forevermore.
Well, Scott, we played a major role—we Americans played a major role in stirring up the hatred between the Shiite and the Sunni Muslims.
Those people lived together for decades, millennia, pretty calmly.
And there are a few people like this guy who wrote—he's an Iranian, ethnic Iranian—who wrote this book, I can't remember his name offhand, saying that the Shia crescent is coming to threaten the Middle East.
The idea, divide and rule.
You know, the old British system, stir them up, turn them against each other, and that's exactly what happened.
But Iraq is a Humpty Dumpty that is not going to be put together again anytime soon.
And it was a disaster, a tragedy, because as I saw myself, Iraq was the most advanced Arab country socially, militarily, industrially, educationally, and that's why it was destroyed, because the Israelis considered it a potential threat.
Yeah.
Well, so now, let's get back to that in just a second, because it's such an important part of it, and I want to go ahead and let you tell that side of the story.
But I also want to go back to 1990 for a second here, before we get too far away from Iraq War I.
Because you say you were there, and I'm not sure if you—I think you said Kuwait, but I think you also told me that you were in Baghdad.
But I was hoping you could give us a timeline of when you got to Kuwait, when you got to Iraq, and what you saw there.
You've told me before about seeing chemical weapons there, but I want to hear about all of your story from that year.
I don't remember the dates when I was there.
I'd have to go into my notes.
Well, but I mean, you know, you got there just before the invasion, or just after, or in the fall.
Probably about a month before the invasion.
And I know everybody was nervous, and I was living on cigarettes and vodka.
Journalists died.
And by there, you're saying inside Kuwait.
No, in Baghdad.
Oh, in Baghdad, okay.
Yeah, and we didn't know whether we were going to be attacked from one day to the next by the U.S. Air Force, or lynched by the Iraqis.
The Iraqis' secret police threatened to hang me as an Israeli spy, which I was not.
And we were really under very great pressure.
And it was very tense.
I remember we were having lunch in a restaurant, and there was a big bang.
Somebody's generator blew up, and everybody stood up and yelled, like that.
They thought the war had begun.
I came with gold coins sewed in my belt in case we had to walk out.
And they started, you know, killing all foreigners.
So it was a very tense time.
And the Iraqis were digging in, getting ready for war.
And then, so at what point were you, did you stay through for the invasion to report on?
Or you got the hell out of there as soon as you could, or what happened there?
I left there, I think about a week before the bombing campaign began.
Wow.
So then, at that whole time, you were reporting for the Toronto Sun from inside Iraq, all during the time between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
Wow.
And can I read all that stuff?
Sure.
I wrote columns at the time.
I mean, are they all at the Toronto Sun site still?
That archive goes back to them?
No.
The Toronto Sun was so angry at me for my heresies that I made, particularly about Afghanistan, that they not only ended my column, but they deleted all my columns from their IT systems.
Well, that archive has to exist online somewhere, though.
Tell me, please.
I don't know where.
I've not been able to find it.
However, I've retained copies of the columns, and I'm having my trusty assistant, Janet, put them back online.
I don't know how far she's gotten.
Oh, man.
That would be such a treasure.
I'd love to read that.
So then, when you were there, when the secret police weren't accusing you of being an Israeli spy, they were leading you around, showing you American chemical weapons supplies?
No.
I found the British technicians who were manufacturing chemical and biological weapons for the Iraqis at a town called Salman Pak.
I found them while I was interviewing foreign refugees who had been herded into one of the hotels in Baghdad by the Iraqis.
Oh, I see.
And so these were British contractors that were there, and then they just spilled their guts to you and were like, oh, yeah, we're here making sarin.
Yes.
They were angry at the Iraqis, and not many of them used their poison gas.
And talk about hypocrisy.
You were the British helping the Iraqis develop chemical weapons for use against the Iranians.
Right.
As long as it was against Iran, that was kosher.
And we were claiming that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons and nuclear weapons.
It's all a huge pack of lies.
And they showed you some of this stuff at the time, too?
No, they showed us their notebooks.
Oh, I see.
I did not get into the chemical warfare labs in Salman Pak, but they were there.
Well, and you're saying, I mean, you had these two British scientists, contractors who worked on the project, both agreeing and telling you the story about it.
That sounds well-reported to me.
Yes.
Man.
Well, I sure am glad that you have your own copy of that whole archive.
I bet you there are university libraries and stuff that have them somewhere.
Well, they're there.
I can dig them out when you need them.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, yeah, go ahead and send me PDFs of whatever you got from anything you reported from Iraq during that time, or even, I mean, once you got back to Canada or wherever you were, reporting on the war, any of that.
I'd love to read every bit of that.
Okay.
I got to somehow keep this book under 600 pages, but I'm not sure.
There's so much that's got to go in there, but so much has got to be excluded too.
Yeah.
Now, don't make it too long.
People won't read it.
No, I won't.
It's got to be, it's supposed to be like one good little bit about all of the wars of the 21st century.
Well, Carter through now, but not overkill on any one of them, I hope.
Okay.
Anyway.
Yeah.
My own little version of American Raj, only not as good.
Good luck.
Yeah.
All right.
So now let's talk about the Likud.
Let's talk about Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu and the clean break policy and Iraq War II.
You know, I one time read this very interesting thing by J.J. Goldberg at the Forward about how it was really, to say Likud is to oversimplify, it was really the Netanyahu faction and therefore the American neocons who were really so hell bent on Iraq War II.
Whereas Sharon, I guess was smart enough to see that you're just going to empower Iran.
So unless you're promising me you're going to Tehran next, I'm worried about this, who, but then of course ended up getting on board.
And as we know from the Guardian, from Julian Borger, or Borger, or Borger, I forget.
We know from Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation that Ariel Sharon's office was even manufacturing bogus intelligence in English to stovepipe into the intelligence stream.
So they sure did participate in all of that.
But I think a lot of people don't know much about that story and would probably like to hear you tell it.
Well, the Israelis were entirely in favor of the war.
In fact, they helped engineer it.
You're not allowed to say that in the American media.
I don't know about the subtleties between Sharon and the rest of the party, but the Israelis regarded Iraq as their principal Arab enemy because they had emasculated Egypt with the Camp David Accords.
And Sadat, when he was there after him, Mubarak, they took Egypt completely out of the equation.
It was a brilliant ploy.
Egyptians were bought off by huge bribes to the Egyptian leadership.
And the only Arab country that was left that had any oomph to it was Iraq, and then Syria, to a lesser degree.
So the Israelis were very anxious to destroy Iraq and Syria, because that would have eliminated any threat to what they call their eastern border, and would have left Israel militarily unchallenged in the Arab world.
So there was a huge media campaign against Saddam that was in part led by Rupert Murdoch with his people, with all kinds of anti-Saddam articles and books and things like that, to which the Kuwaitis gleefully contributed and helped.
And the Israelis actually got America to remove the only Arab country that ever had a hope of developing nuclear weapons, and that was done very effectively.
Iraq didn't have any nuclear weapons at the time, but it had some industry, some industrial capacity, and that was completely destroyed by the Americans.
In fact, we were so ruthless in our attacks on Iraq that we destroyed their entire water system in the country, their sanitary engineering, the sewers, the pumping plants, the water filtration systems, everything was destroyed.
We bombed Iraq back to a pre-industrial age.
And that was just Iraq War I, and then they did it again.
Yes.
We made the rubble bounce.
And by the way, I was in ninth grade during Iraq War I, so I was paying a lot of attention, but I did not understand a lot of the deep context of this and that.
So I wonder, would our role—I mean, I think it goes without saying, but it shouldn't, and people can read a lot about this, but the neoconservative group was just absolutely at the core of pushing us into Iraq War II.
But was it the same case with Iraq War I?
Not quite as much.
You had—I call them the imperialist camp in Washington.
A lot of Cold Warriors and Bushites in Texas, the oil lobby, which is very powerful, they wanted— So the entire center, in other words, the Democrats and the Republicans and everyone who works for them.
Yeah.
They had their own agenda, but it wasn't as sharply focused as was the neocon lobby.
The imperial lobby, if you want to call them that, also had thoughts about America's role in the larger Middle East.
The neocons didn't.
They just wanted to destroy the Arabs and be rid of them.
Well, I mean, it is true that as ginned up as Iraq War I was, you did have a plainly obvious causus belli there with the invasion of Kuwait.
Not that America had the legal authority to do anything about that, but anyway, at least something had happened.
Whereas in Iraq War II, they were basically just saying, hey, you're still mad about 9-11, right?
All right, we're going to do one more, and just getting away with bloody murder.
So there was a lot more to question, and it took a lot more focused effort to push us into that thing, to make it all seem so inevitable that it had to be done at the time.
And Scott, there was another important element.
The dog that didn't bark, to quote Sherlock Holmes, Russia, then under Mikhail Gorbachev, gave Washington a green light to go ahead and attack Iraq, which had been a major ally for the Russians, a major customer for Russian arms.
Importantly, they could have voted no on the Security Council, and that would have been a veto.
That's right.
Right.
Or the Russians could have sent troops to Iraq, or any number of things.
But Gorbachev just turned his back and gave the Americans carte blanche, do what you want.
I think that was a terrible mistake by Gorbachev and Russia.
So now, when it comes to the neocons pushing us into Iraq War II, there are two pretty — I'm not sure exactly how I'd break this down, but two major kind of competing theories.
One of them is just, yeah, smash all Arab states, and especially Iraq, into as small pieces as you can, because that's what's good for Israel.
And so, certainly representing this point, you have, this point of view, you have Michael Ledeen saying, we must turn the Middle East into a boiling cauldron.
And if people read Jonah Goldberg, the editor of the National Review, in his article, Baghdad de Linde Est, and Baghdad de Linde Est Part II, where he is certainly representing that same view, that Ledeenian view, that what we want is total chaos.
Now, at the end of that, they said that then everything will work out better.
That right now, like he said, it's humpty dumpty.
You have this 20 percent Sunni minority sitting on the Kurds and the Shiite supermajority this way, and you have this artificial Sykes-Picot line and all these things, and that it really is a problem.
And so, we're going to go ahead and shake it all up in order to make things, you know, better.
In other words, they weren't, even as violent as their policy they were advocating was, they weren't saying it in the most nihilistic way.
They were saying, in order to create a better day someday.
But then at the same time, there's another narrative, still, you know, neoconservative focused, you know, Wolfowitzian focused.
And even I would say the clean break, because I think people throw in the clean break with that first point of view there.
But the clean break basically says, this is going to be easy.
The clean break says, that's David Wormser and Richard Perle and Douglas Feist signed that, the advice to Netanyahu in 96.
And it says, yeah, we'll have a Jordanian Hashemite king, maybe the cousin of the current king of Jordan, will come and be the king.
And the Shiite supermajority just loves being told what to do by Hashemite kings, man.
And so, it'll be fine.
And then they will put pressure on Syria and on Hezbollah, and they'll, you know, help to thwart Iran's ambitions, and they'll build the oil and water pipeline to Haifa.
And it'll be easy, right?
Like when Shinseki said, it'll take 300,000 troops, Wolfowitz said, that's wildly off the mark.
We only need, eh, maybe a few tens of thousands, enough to invade.
And then it's going to be fine.
So I wonder if you think that that was really kind of a means to an end, that they were saying they wanted to really create that chaos, and that was why they dissolved the army?
Because their excuse for dissolving the army was like, hey, the Ba'athist army, it was horrible.
It was Saddam's army of war crimes and everything.
We're starting fresh here, right?
Like they made it sound like they were just naive and were really doing their best to do their best.
And so the truth has got to be some of both and in between and what the hell, I don't know, but what do you think?
I think so, Scott.
It's always a murky line between stupidity and incompetence.
You don't really know.
And malevolence, for that matter, you know, I mean, because if they're outright saying, we just want to create a boiling cauldron and keep it boiling, then that's evil, right?
It was better for Israel than, you know, a united, powerful Arab country.
The Israelis had a much sharper understanding of the issue there.
The American neocons just believed the propaganda that was circulating around and all the scare stories.
And, you know, I was there, I know, when they came with the claims that Saddam had drones of death that were going to fly over Iraqi freighters skulking in the North Atlantic and were going to attack sleeping America.
I was worthy of the World War Two propaganda movies.
And a lot of people believe that I was on.
I was the chief CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commentator for for Gulf War Two.
And I had the mischance, the audacity to say on air that the Israelis helped engineer the war.
And I was immediately removed from the station.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
You know, Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Philip Zelikow, who is really the principal author or overseer of the creation of the 9-11 report and everything, very official guy from inside the National Security Council, said, oh yeah, the war was for Israel.
So he's, he's, you know, in competition with you for speaking frankly.
I'm not sure if he was on TV or not.
You know, I was reminded the other day, I forget if I said this on the show or somebody was interviewing me or what, but it came up that Tim Russert once asked Richard Perle on Meet the Press, hey, Richard Perle, you guys wrote this thing, A Clean Break, saying to hurt Iran, get rid of Saddam for them.
I don't know.
So but are you telling me that all your advocacy for Iraq War Two now is, doesn't have anything to do with Israel?
And Richard Perle's like, that's right, Tim, it has nothing to do with Israel.
That was it.
Oh, okay.
No follow-up question.
I mean, at least he brought it up, but.
That's right.
That's right.
After, from Baghdad, I remember writing in my paper that once the U.S. has overthrown Saddam, they're going to have to go and find another one.
And so far they haven't succeeded.
Yeah.
Well, and that was part of the thing too, right, was Ariel Sharon said, you have to do Syria and Libya and Iran next.
And John Bolton said, Syria, Libya, Iran, you're next.
So especially, I mean, I don't know, maybe Qaddafi let, you know, more jihadis go to Iraq War Two than usual, the later heroes of America's war in 2011, who went to go fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency there.
But certainly the U.S. gave the Iranians every motive in the world to create this massive competition for influence among the Shiite factions and gave Assad every motive in the world to let every right-wing Sunni kook cross the Sykes-Picot line to go help the Sunni insurgency too, that, hey, if we're next, we're going to help keep you busy in the unfortunate country you've already invaded before you add ours to the list, which for the Syrians, you know, only worked for a little while, but you know, so far we haven't invaded Iran.
So anyway, I guess war with Iran we'll save for next time, Eric, but thanks very much for coming back on the show.
I learned a lot as always.
Let's, we'll keep that in reserve.
I'm sure it's going to happen.
So just a matter of time.
Stay tuned.
Oh man.
Well, I didn't want to hear you say that, but all right, the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
Thanks again.
Working with you, Scott.
Yeah.
You too, man.
All right.
You guys, ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis.
And that's the only place that you can read a critical take on Trump recognizing Israeli control of the Golan Heights there, the way they did and such like that.
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